AAROC is Slacking

Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre is on Slack.

The Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre is a distributed initiative - we are people from all across Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states, trying to work together to maintain a platform for collaboration for the scientists we serve.
It is impossible to meet face-to-face - often we have to co-operate with folks we’ve never even met.
There’s only one way to do this - a central place where we can all talk to each other.

Where work happens

Sure, we use slack to talk to each other, but it’s also a key element of getting work done. We use slack in many ways to reduce the load on (human) members of the community, keep up to date with ongoing campaigns, projects and tasks.

Slack for humans

Anyone in the community is welcome to join our slack. We consider the interaction between operators, developers and researchers to be at the heart of a vibrant e-Infrastructure community. Slack is good for realtime communications and chat - sometimes you need to have a longer or deeper conversation. For that we use the discussion forum. Here are some of the ways we use slack to get humans talking:

Operations

We create a channel for each site participating, with the pattern CountryCode-SiteName-opse.g.za-chpc-ops

The Next Platform

Computational platforms are continually evolving. Sites are always experimenting with new methods and tools. To make sense of it all, we often need to tap the collective experience of the community to find out what works. All things "next" are discussed in next-platform

Research application areas

If you're a scientist and want to know how to get the best use of the platform for your particular application, we create channels for domain-specific chats, like hlt-research for human language technologies.

Slack for automation

We have a lot of helpers out there, checking our code, our services, making life easier for us. Messages from GitHub, Jenkins, Travis, Ansible and other automated beings out there help keep the team in tune with what's happening. Messages from robots are typically kept to specific channels like #code, #devops-bootstrap

CODE-RADE

All of the applications built with CODE-RADE talk to our slack. Code commits from GitHub, build, test statuses and issues for each application in the repository come to application-specific channels. If you're working on integrating a specific application, all you need to do is hang out in that channel to know how things are going.
Anouncements from Jenkins and CMVFS about repo transactions come to coderade

Foundry

We follow the Everything == Code pattern. Our services are built, tested and deployed from code - typically found in DevOps. When our containers, images, and services are built, our community is immediately informed, via messages from Quay, Docker, etc